Sunday, June 13, 2010

Literary Interlude:

'Like the celebrities who would follow, Gatsby was a symbol of twentieth-century America, where so many were discovering the fairy's wing on which to found their own unreal reality. Decades later, advertisers would invent a motto to accompany the symbol. It came from an oft-shown television commercial of the 1980s featuring a soap-opera actor pitching a pain reliever. 'I am not a doctor, but I play one on TV,' he said. In the same way Gatsby might have said, 'I was not an Oxford grad, but I played one,' or President Reagan might have said, 'I was not a president, but I played one,'... In a culture of personality, playing one was just as good as being one, which threatened to make us a faux society of authors without books, artists without art, musicians without music, politicians without policies, scholars without scholarship.'